Data copying

[johnridley]

It's taking a LOT longer to copy data back to NTFS after deciding to move back to Windows than it did to move to ext4. It all has to be done in Linux since there's no ext4 driver for Windows, and Linux is a lot better at reading NTFS than writing it. The last 700GB copy took over a day ext4->NTFS. It only took Windows about 6 hours to copy the same data from NTFS to NTFS after I reformatted the ext4 volume.

I did just tonight remember that the external drive bay that I'm using has an eSATA port. I don't usually use it because it doesn't support hot swap, and I have to reboot every time I want to change drives, and usually I just want to toss a drive in to do an incremental backup or grab an album off an MP3 directory. But when copying a whole terabyte from one drive to another, it's worth it, it's a hell of a lot faster.

Comments

[kevinnickerson.livejournal.com]

Quicker to make a rar, move that and then unrar?

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

I don't think so. The only thing that would help would be if it's just incredibly slow at writing to directories, and it seems like it's just slow in general. This morning when I woke up, it was copying multi-gigabyte AVIs in the home video directories, and it was still really slow, even with eSATA.

I am not too far from being done at this point. The on/offsite backups don't need to be copied from/to, just reformatted one at a time and the backup re-run, and I can do that all in Windows.

I have a 200GB partition to go and then I think I'm done moving data. There will be some cleanup to do on the drives, I'm sure a few things moved around here and there.